Dynamic Site Mapping

Dynamics of Dynamic Site Mapping

Dynamic site mapping technology empowers your search engine visibility by indexing your hard to get dynamic content. DSM provides you with a deep-crawled searchable index for dynamic pages. This enables you to obtain web page access information (page view event tracking), and compile web site statistics reports that provide page visitation data and client marketing information.

What Is Dynamic Site Mapping

During the early days web site content was almost entirely static HTML or text documents. By definition, static document is a web page that is saved to disk and passed back to a requesting browser without changes. Whereas a dynamic web page is a web page, which has, content that is changed through a program or script at the time the page is requested. Common examples of trivial dynamic pages are the current date and time. A dynamic site is easily recognized by the "?" or other special characters located in the page's URL.

Optimizing Dynamic Pages

For ages, search engine spiders were unable to index dynamic pages dependably. But now search engine technology has advanced and even complex dynamic URLs are appearing in the SERPs now. There are certain basics that a search engine requires to successfully index your dynamic page:

URL Processing Ability - Even though Search engine technology is improving by leaps and bounds, search engine experts still recommend restricting dynamic URLs to two parameters or less.

Content Accessing Ability - Search engine spiders cannot enter values into forms, so any content that is accessible only through a form on your site is just one more part of the invisible web.

Ability to Return to Your Page - Spiders encounter problems if they cache a dynamic URL with a session ID. If that session ID times out, the indexed page will most likely point any search engine referrer to an error page and the search engine spider will be unable to return to your page for further spidering. For that reason, most search engine spiders do not cache dynamic URLs with session IDs.
Dynamic sites require highly specialized search engine marketing strategies that differ from those used for static sites. It's till date hard to get dynamic sites indexed unless they're properly optimized.

The Problem

Dynamic pages are created on the fly with technology such as ASP, Cold Fusion, and Perl etc. Such pages work well for users who visit the site, but don't work well for search engine crawlers. As dynamically generated pages don't actually exist until a user selects the variable(s) that generate them. A search engine spider can't select variables; as a result pages don't get generated, and cant be indexed.

Crawlers such as Goggle and Yahoo can't read the entire dynamic database of URLs, which either contain a query string (?) or other database characters (#&*!%) which are spider traps. As search crawlers have problems reading deep into a dynamic database, they are programmed to detect and ignore many dynamic URLs.

The Solution

There are a few dynamic-page optimization techniques that can be used for the indexing of dynamic sites:

1. Converting dynamic URLs to search engine-friendly URLs for ex: Using tools like Goggle site crawler and DSM developed by Bruce Clay converting dynamic Active Server Pages (ASP) pages into search engine-compatible formats.

2. Placing links to dynamic pages on static pages, and submitting static pages to the search engines manually according to each search engine's guidelines is another way out. This is easily done with a Table of Contents page that displays links to dynamic pages. While the crawlers can't index the entire dynamic page, they will index most of the content.

3. Another way to achieve wider visibility is to use paid inclusion and trusted feed programs that guarantee the indexing of dynamic sites, or a specific number of click-bys.

4.The best way to get a dynamic site fully indexed is to first fix the URLs by having them rewritten into static appearing URLs.

The Importance of Dynamic Site Mapping For SEO

Dynamic site mapping is important because search engine optimizer need as much content to be found and indexed as possible. Indexing is important, as it has an impact on how the site will perform on the search engines.

Every single page indexed increases the chance of a visitor frequency to the site. Each page can potentially be ranked for any combination of keywords found on that page.

The second most important reason for indexing is because they influence link popularity. The search engines today are driven by link popularity. The site with the most links can rank higher than the site with fewer links.

Conclusion

Dynamic Site Mapping simplifies content management, streamlines website generation and provides personalization features that cannot be replicated with purely static web pages. If accurately utilized by SEOs it can double a sites popularity and increase business opportunities and revenue.